[Nonstatist]

Shoeless Joe deserves in before that dope dealing thug and cheat does. Given how absolutely compromised and squishy Major League Baseball has been in the past (Steve Howe violated drug rules 7 times!) I can't see how they can just ignore the perfidy of somebody who gambled on his own team (!) .

[hole_n_one]

Shoeless Joe deserves in before that dope dealing thug and cheat does....

Source?

[BluesDuke]

Shoeless Joe deserves in before that dope dealing thug and cheat does.

Merely because Pete Rose happened to have some very sleazeoid friends who happened to be dealing in drugs (predominantly steroids, as I understand it to have been) does not mean that Pete Rose himself was dealing drugs. As for Shoeless Joe Jackson, see my comment above to the other gentleman.

Given how absolutely compromised and squishy Major League Baseball has been in the past (Steve Howe violated drug rules 7 times!)

I don't disagree on the manner in which Steve Howe wasn't dealt with - although I do know, also, that Fay Vincent became a little too heavy handed (I speak politely) with the Yankees when he got his eighth drug strike.

Little remembered: Vincent not only called three Yankee officials including then-manager Buck Showalter onto his carpet, he also bullied and browbeat them in so doing - he practically ordered Showalter onto the carpet and threatened both his job and his baseball eligibility to do it; in addition, he threatened all three officials because at least one and possibly two of them, in answering questions from Vincent's representatives, had enunciated their own questions about the substance and manner of MLB's drug policy - they were certainly entitled to speak thus, and they did not deserve to be threatened with their jobs and their standing to hold baseball jobs merely for disagreeing with either a particular policy or portions and operations thereof.

It didn't mean anyone sympathised necessarily with Steve Howe in order for people to realise that his maltreatment of those three Yankee officials (Showalter, famously enough, was held up by Vincent and his people from showing up for the Yankees' game in New York that day, and it was the talk of New York for a couple of days) was an indication that Vincent had gone too far in asserting himself something short of a dictator, rather than merely a "strong" commissioner. It's a bloody shame that it turned out to be Bug Selig who led the overthrow of Vincent, considering the unmitigated disaster Selig has been, but if it hadn't been him it would have been, likely enough, someone else.

I can't see how they can just ignore the perfidy of somebody who gambled on his own team (!).

Aside from the point that it is not proven once and for all that Rose bet on his own team (it is at least likely that his sleazeoid companions of the time were laying down bets on the Reds and claiming them to be Rose's bets), I would ask how on earth merely betting on one team is more perfidious than accepting a payoff in a plan to fix and throw a World Series.